It wasn’t just his physical closeness that was wearing me smooth like waves against rocks.
Of course, as a woman and an educated, strong-willed one at that, I took fundamental umbrage with the mafia. How could any woman romanticize a system that viewed families as a feudal system run by men and only men, with the women used as janitors, cooks, nannies, and the occasional matrimonial bargaining chip?
This, I was learning, was not the borgata of Dante Salvatore. Of course, there was still a hierarchy. Dante and Tore at the top, a kind of bizarre co-captaincy you didn’t often see between mafiosos who were, as a rule, power-hungry and incapable of compromise. Then Frankie Amato, the tech whiz and right-hand man, who magicked whatever the Salvatores wanted seemingly out of thin air. There were the underbosses below that, manning their own mini fiefdoms, but they were not, I’d learned, exclusively male.
Frankie’s wife did work for the family.
Yara was their consigliere, a woman, and a non-Italian.
It was obvious that Dante had flouted the traditional norms that had ruled the Camorra and other Italian organizations like it for decades.
And it seemed to be working, financially at least.
No one seemed to want for anything. I’d seen the matte black Ferrari 458 Spider in the garage, secretly lusting after it; the Rolex, Patek Phillipe, and Piaget watches on the wrists of Dante and his men; the sheer size and expensive furnishings of the apartment I lived in temporarily. Dante and his crew of merry criminals owned hotel chains and construction companies, an incredibly lucrative and innovative energy company, and restaurants and bars across the company. The sheer scale of their legitimate or at least legitimate-facing businesses was staggering. In combination with their illegal dealings, the loan sharking, gambling, and fraud I never caught wind of, I could only guess at the billions of dollars coming in.
It also seemed evident that this new-fangled way of doing things did not go over well with important members in other organized crime families. I eavesdropped without shame, the lawyer in me unable to resist, and Dante didn’t try as hard as he could have to shield me from things.
I knew the di Carlo family was after him. The same family that had wrapped Cosima up in a drive-by shooting and put her in a coma.
When Gideone di Carlo called me, not once but twice, I didn’t answer, and eventually, I blocked his number.
In short, I knew too much.
Too much about the men behind the criminal masks, Chen’s quick mind, Marco’s humor, Frankie’s charm, Adriano’s quiet kindness, and even Jacopo’s bursts of good-natured ribbing. It was so much more difficult to hate them for their crimes when I knew more about their personalities than their illegal activities.
I had always found, if you could understand something, it was almost impossible to hate it because then you could empathize with it.
The same, of course, could be said for their boss.
Slowly and irrevocably spending time around Dante’s heat had thawed my icy demeanor toward him. I found myself bantering with him instead of trying to cut him to pieces with the sharp edge of my tongue. After going back to work from my surgery, I spent my late working hours at the living room desk or coffee table instead of the office because I liked the company.
His company.
One month of our forced proximity, and I was dangerously close to capitulating to his game of corruption.
Giving in to the lust I felt swelling tsunami strong in my gut. A sensation I had never in my twenty-seven years felt before meeting Dante.
The thaw he’d instigated with that simple neck kiss and extraordinary show of masturbation had never made me more aware of my body and its yearnings. I felt almost sensually alive, aware of the taste of food on my tongue, the very air on my skin, the cashmere I pulled on my body to ward against the deepening winter chill. I found myself craving things I’d eschewed for so long, chocolate and whiskey, dance and song, but most of all, sex.
I wanted him so badly even my teeth ached with it.
The last few mornings, I’d even woken up with wet between my thighs from dreaming of the ways a man like Dante might touch me there.
I squeezed my thighs together beneath the table on the patio that morning as Dante and I sat drinking coffee, both of us reading our respective newspapers before I headed into work. It was an oddly domestic scene, but I didn’t allow myself to linger too long on that.
“You seem…agitated this morning, Elena,” Dante noted in that smooth, accented drawl he used when he was teasing me.
I glared at him, irritated with us both for the interminable dance we were locked together in. “I slept badly.”
“Bad dreams?” he asked with a quirk of a black brow.